> It sounds like Star Trek has a lot of similarities with the Culture novels. Both depict an imagined communist utopia in which everyone is flawless, that butts up against or sometimes interferes with other flawed societies.

I think this description is flawed both with respect to Star Trek and The Culture. Nobody is flawless in either one of them. On the contrary, the stories very often focus on the flaws of people in these societies, often exposed in the intersection of these societies and a messier outside world, but also within.

> In Star Trek (as written by Roddenberry) the Federation is a society that doesn't use money, there is no internal strife, virtually everyone is moral and good with Picard being the apex human

TOS had a federation scientist introduce nazism on a planet because he thought it'd make them advance faster. DS9 showed a coup on Earth. There's been plenty of both internal strife and immoral behaviour showcased in Star Trek. A lot of the stories focus on overcoming their flaws, ranging from minor personality flaws, to outright bigotry (not just in the nazi example).

> The communist nature of Star Trek TNG/Voyager is quite obscure until you see it, and then you can't unsee it anymore. This is no surprise because Roddenberry's views changed in the decades between TOS and TNG until by the 1980s he was an avowed Maoist.

Any post-scarcity society will look like communism/anarchism unless it is intentionally keeping part of its population poor for no good reason. And if it intentionally refuses to share, it will look cruel and oppressive.

The distinction between a "communist utopia" and capitalism falls apart the moment you posit near-or-full post-scarcity.

So the choice then becomes one of whether the society you show is post-scarcity or not.

> https://blog.plan99.net/i-want-to-see-a-libertarian-star-tre...

Consider that libertarianism started on the very far left: Joseph Dejacque, the founder of libertarianism, was an anarcho-communist who cheered on Proudhon's "property is theft" but denounced Proudhon for being a "moderate anarchist, liberal, but not libertarian", because a vision of maximal freedom that is positive and founded on an idea of eventually being capable of meeting all human needs will tend towards depicting a future where those needs are met for everyone.

> Obviously it's not a very serious essay but at the end I do wonder why there are so few optimistic depictions of the future. Even though the arc of human history has been solidly upwards, very little fiction is willing to extrapolate that forwards, and when it does happen the authors are always communists so we get weird, implausible takes on human nature that make humans feel more alien than the aliens. I guess it's because Marxism requires at its core an explicitly utopian prediction of the future to offset the rather less utopian consequences of bloody revolution. Whereas capitalism - being not so much an ideology as a thing that springs up naturally even when governments are trying to suppress it - doesn't have any kind of view on what the future will look like.

The challenge is that it gets harder and harder to create a positive depiction of a future with more and more material wealth that still chooses to leave some portion of society behind in scarcity. If everyone is "rich" then the distinguishing elements of such a society between socialism and capitalism becomes fewer and fewer until they become invisible.